[nytopop]

That doesn't seem right. Why wouldn't intelligence help predict the unexpected? The point of their argument is that higher intelligence may make it easier to expect what somebody with a lower intelligence would not expect.

People don't think in strictly logical terms, there's a whole mess of abstract pattern matching and built up experiential anticipations embedded in the process.

That pun might require some iota of shared knowledge, but it doesn't require much intelligence to get. Amount of knowledge doesn't define intelligence - someone who scores low on an IQ test will get that joke just as much as someone who scores highly (not that I'm equating IQ score with intelligence).

I don't think that a lack of shared knowledge is what they are getting at. Complexity of a joke has more to do with lots of disparate moving pieces, so to speak. The ability to quickly perceive those pieces - and what is unexpected within them - isn't shared by everyone.